If you have been working with the default validators in ASP.NET for a while you are probably used to the plain old look they create on your page and while you can rework the way they look, ASP.NET validators are essentially a Label. They are unable to change the appearance of other elements or run scripts without a complete page postback.

jQuery TOOLS is a jQuery based UI library you can find here. jQuery TOOLS contains a validator as a part of its form tools. The jQuery TOOLS validator is based on HTML 5 and CSS standards and has the ability to animate, change the appearances of the element it is validating, support multiple languages and more.

In this article I am doing to show how to quickly plug jQuery TOOLS into ASP.NET’s validation so that you can continue to use default validation along with the new look.

First let’s build our form. We are going to use ASP TextBoxs along with CustomValidators.

Let’s import jQuery tools along with some CSS directly taken from their example:

For security purposes and to accommodate JavaScript disabled browsers we also need server side validation. Since we are checking for a required name and email, the server side validation will look like this: